As organizations of all sizes and in every industry forge ahead with digital transformation initiatives, technology is increasingly critical to business operations. Like never before, employees rely on technology to do just about everything, and tech issues that cause downtime or service interruptions can impact their ability to get anything done.
As the primary interface between employees and the IT department, the Service Desk is an essential function in any organization. IT service management (ITSM) tools help Service Desk personnel manage and mitigate any issues that employees have with technology, from failed or broken equipment, to poor network performance, to password recovery. They are critical to ensuring business continuity and optimizing IT costs.
Key Benefits
- Automates IT asset discovery, eliminating manual, time-consuming tasks
- Speeds ticket resolution with access to complete, accurate and very granular data
- Enables ITIL process alignment and simplifies data governance
- Supports current on-premises implementations and future cloud-based deployments
“Lansweeper is extremely simple for our clients to use, and enables them to more easily align their workflows with ITIL processes. It’s also useful for data governance, because it provides a single source of truth for IT asset data that can be used across ITSM and CMDB tools.”
Paweł Kuźniar, CEO at OPGK Rzeszow S.A. / Mint Service Desk
Paweł Kuźniar, CEO at OPGK Rzeszow S.A. / Mint Service DeskHandling Time Can Make the Service Desk a Bottleneck
However, if the service desk is slow to troubleshoot and resolve tickets, it can become a bottleneck to business operations, costing organization’s a lot of money. According to MetricNet, businesses spend an average of $1.60 per minute resolving a ticket — and the average mean time to repair (MTTR) for failed or broken equipment is more than 8 hours. With enterprise IT service desks receiving an average of 492 tickets per month, it’s clear that any lag time in ticket resolution can be extremely costly.
Why does it take so long to resolve a ticket? Because information about the device, software, configuration, and the user is often missing, incomplete, or inaccurate. Lack of data hampers the Service Desk staff’s visibility across the IT infrastructure — and that increases handling time, a key driver of MTTR. Even ITSM tools that integrate with CMDBs may not have up-to-date or complete information, because usually, the CMDB is also outdated. Manual processes for updating the CMDB are common; data can become stale quickly, while human error introduces inaccuracies that can impact the ability to make informed decisions.
To be truly useful to an organization’s service desk, ITSM tools must be able to collect, organize and leverage complete and accurate data about the IT infrastructure, reduce manual work that can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, and enable rapid ticket response and resolution. That’s why Mint Service Desk decided to integrate Lansweeper’s IT asset discovery technology with its ITSM platform.
For MintSD, Automated IT Asset Discovery Is a Must
With customers primarily in East Europe and Latin America, Mint Service Desk aims to bring enterprise-grade ITSM software and functionalities to small- and mid-sized companies at an affordable price. The company focuses on delivering on-premises ITSM solutions, customized to meet the unique needs of its clients.
“Our customers enjoy the flexibility to customize our solution to their specific requirements.”
Paweł Kuźniar, CEO at OPGK Rzeszow S.A. / Mint Service Desk
While MintSD’s platform was designed with robust asset management capabilities, it lacked the ability to automatically discover IT assets. Without automated discovery, clients would have had to manually input IT asset data, to achieve visibility and have the information they need to handle and resolve service tickets. Since IT infrastructure is constantly changing, ongoing updates and maintenance would have been necessary — and that wasn’t an option.
The company set out to find a solution they could integrate with the MintSD platform that would not only automate IT asset discovery but provide a breadth and depth of data to help clients manage IT service desk requests more efficiently. “We evaluated several IT asset discovery tools and learned that some of our customers were already using Lansweeper,” Kuźniar said. “We decided it would be a huge benefit to our entire customer base if we integrated Lansweeper with our platform.”
Integration Enables Informed Decision Making and Rapid Issue Resolution
Lansweeper combines agent-based and agentless scanning to discover connected assets across the IT infrastructure using a wide range of network protocols. It automatically explores the IT environment and retrieves granular data about every device — including device type, location, users, installed software, logon information, and more. With complete and accurate IT asset data at their fingertips, Service Desk teams can optimize scheduling for service requests, minimize service disruptions and restore services faster when they go down. Having Lansweeper data on hand enables teams to develop self-service offerings and promote knowledge sharing across the organization, as well.
Lansweeper leverages Asset Radar and Credential-free Device Recognition (CDR) technologies to discover any and all devices — even those that connect briefly and drop off. It illuminates shadow IT and spots rogue devices, as well, and uncovers forgotten or idle devices that would likely be missed by manual inventory processes. With access to accurate IT asset data through the Lansweeper integration, MintSD customers will know when software may be to blame for any reported issues, or when equipment needs to be replaced. They can understand dependencies for configuration changes and avoid changes that may impact other IT services.
“Thanks to Lansweeper, clients can use our platform not only to resolve issues faster but assess the impact of planned configuration and infrastructure changes, so that resolving tickets doesn’t introduce additional problems,” Kuźniar said.
“Lansweeper is extremely simple for our clients to use, and enables them to more easily align their workflows with ITIL processes. It’s also useful for data governance, because it provides a single source of truth for IT asset data that can be used across ITSM and CMDB tools.”
Paweł Kuźniar, CEO at OPGK Rzeszow S.A. / Mint Service Desk
Next Up? The Cloud
According to Kuźniar, the Mint Service Desk integration with Lansweeper was quick and straightforward. “The cooperation and support from Lansweeper was really amazing,” he said. And while MintSD and Lansweeper are just at the beginning of their journey together as partners, Kuźniar said Lansweeper will be instrumental in helping the company develop and introduce a cloud version of the platform, planned for release as early as Q4 2021.
“We’re looking forward to working with Lansweeper as we expand our offerings to include a SaaS-based delivery model.”
Paweł Kuźniar, CEO at OPGK Rzeszow S.A. / Mint Service Desk